Great time to eat, drink in Monterey

Updated 1:31 pm, Monday, September 15, 2014

Dining table at the ready at Casanova, one of the stops on Staci Giovino’s Carmel food tour.

Dining table at the ready at Casanova, one of the stops on Staci Giovino’s Carmel food tour.

Photo: Sarah Rice / Special To The Chronicle

Great time to eat, drink in Monterey

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The Monterey Peninsula is always an excllent getaway for Bay Area folk, and with fall on the horizon, the timing for a visit couldn’t be better. The fog thins out, as do the summer crowds, and the region feels as if it’s our own special treasure.

That’s especially true if your passions are food and wine, the focus of this special section.

For wine lovers, it could mean paying a visit to Twisted Vines, a small winery and tasting room with a charitable mission. The Zinfandel vineyards are nearly 100 years old, but they’re now being farmed with new passion and skill.

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For a very different look at Wine Country, take a drive along Highway 101 to scope out one of the largest vineyards in the world — San Bernabe, now owned by the Indelicato family of Delicato Family Vineyards. Its story reveals much about the history of California wine, as Chronicle Wine Editor Jon Bonné points out in his fascinating report.

Wine is very much at the forefront at Passionfish, a Pacific Grove dining destination. How the list is composed — its smart selection and innovative pricing — attracts wine aficionados from around the world.

Keeping to the beverage side of things, contributor Mark C. Anderson heads to the new Alvarado Street Brewing Co. in Monterey. It’s part urban renewal, part artisan craft — but the sum is the sort of high-energy spot that draws in locals and visitors alike.

Monterey and Carmel are eminently suited for on-foot adventures — like a walking food tour of Carmel. Staci Giovino founded the tour company two years ago to give people a behind-the-scenes look of some of Carmel’s culinary, and historical, highlights — with tastes, of course, as Chronicle staff writer Meredith May discovered.

Local flavor is also the mantra of La Balena, a 2-year-old Italian restaurant in Carmel, where the owners insist on every ingredient coming from the area’s small producers. As May reports, that can mean chicken just twice a week, and no Coke on the menu.

One of those local producers, Viridis Aquaponics, is raising both crops and fish with a high-tech circle-of-life technique some might call transformative. It’s the type of only-in-California approach that’s attracting worldwide interest.